Having had a direct involvement with America’s first post-rock dedicated festival, dunk!usa, I know first hand how hard it is to mount a successful event featuring largely fringe artists. When you live in my bubble and you book Russian Circles and Pelican to headline a two-day event with 20 more high-quality artists in a town neither of them has ever played before, you can become lulled into the mindset that all you have to do is hang out and watch the tickets sell themselves. When you discover how wrong you are, that location is massively important, that timing is a key factor, that even though a band like Russian Circles seems huge to a nerd like you, the reality is that probably one out of every forty people has even heard of them, it can be kind of a bummer. dunk!usa was an amazing event that not a ton of people had the privilege of enjoying. So when Nason Frizzell of the band PILLARS approached me with the idea of doing Post. Festival – essentially a dunk!usa without the post-rock name value, the first two things I felt were (a) excitement, because obviously I was 100% ready to get back at trying to grow this scene and (b) cynicism, because I knew how my expectations of fan dedication had been flattened somewhat by my previous experiences. As it turns out, I’m feeling a bit better about the state of “post” music in America as of this moment.

For nearly 35 years Hirax have been plying their trade of sinister thrash metal with rotating lineups, and now, for the first time in their long career, they visited Guatemala. When considering the most metal-starved fanbases in the world, this small Central American nation is rarely recognized but this is a place where the fans are the embodiment of fanatics, gobbling up every note of music from other countries that comes in front of them.

Death is a terrible thing, arguably the most terrible thing. But when it hits you unaware, with no preparation or warning, it’s even worse. When the person taken from us is, by all accounts, a caring, deep-feeling and innovative musician, new heights of anguish and pain can be encountered. Such was the…

With their fourth album having recently entered their catalog, it only seemed proper for Tesseract to embark on a tour to promote it! Sonder isn’t a huge deviation from Polaris, both of which are a sonic and tonal departure from One and Altered State, but good listens all the way…

There are only a handful of pure energy sources in the world that we as humans can rightly rely on—light energy from the sun, love itself, and, without question, the power of partying. As the very conduit of the partying energy of the universe, Andrew W.K. returns to the recorded…

“There’s a lot of us here,” a short blonde photographer in a patch-laden vest said, cycling through shots, deleting batches frantically to conserve space. “I’ve never seen it like this, it’s crazy. We’ve been waiting for this for a while now.” I thought he was talking about the large amount…

Carpenter Brut is something of a hot item in the electronic scene. From mastermind Frank Hueso, the Poitiers-based electronic artist has risen to popularity with the aggressive, ’80s influenced synthwave, acting as an audible time travel device with a live show to match. Editor-in-Chief Eden Kupermintz has previously sung the…

Whether they’re shooting multiple venues in a night, or meticulously crafting live show reviews; our photographers can be very busy at times. Because of this, we’ve collectively decided to break up our photo content into two different kinds. Posts titled PHOTOS will feature an in-depth review of a show, providing a personal insight into all the subtle nuances of a show along with a small selection of images to accompany the photographer’s thoughts. Whereas posts titled GALLERY will convey the energy and events of a show through a visual narrative, featuring collections of images that speak for themselves without the help of an accompanying write-up. Without further adieu, here is our first Gallery post of the final two shows from Trap Them, with Call of the Void, by resident NY photographer, Mark Valentino!

One of my biggest regrets this year is that I wasn’t able to attend the first ever dunk!USA festival in Burlington, VT this past month. For a number of reasons there simply was no way I would have been able to make it work, but for someone who dearly loves his…

Breaking my streak of not attending shows out of a mix of exhaustion and laziness, I managed to yet again accidentally fall into the position of being on a guest list for an international touring band visiting Brisbane. This time it was Haken’s first ever headlining show in Australia. Having never…